by Theo Varlet
We visited the factories, therefore, as mere gawkers, and there is no point is talking about them at length here.
The one that amused us most produced the synthetic meat, but the sight of its manufacture did not render that ersatz product any tastier. Into large vats, slaves poured evil-smelling chemical products from carboys. The receptacle having been sealed, gas-burners were lit underneath and the mixture simmered; then other slaves opened the taps regulating the outflow of the plastic material, which passed through a rolling mill and flowered into moulds. After cooling, the glue-like waffles with which we were only too familiar were obtained. It was a precious aliment that was not to be squandered, for policemen armed with wands were on watch inside the factory and at the doors. We learned subsequently that every proletarian had a ration of one waffle a day, and the wrestlers two.
The manufacture of cloth did not employ vegetable or animal fibers—cotton, wool, silk, etc.—as on Earth. The only materials entering into fabrics were metal and glass. Threads of aluminum, silver, copper, and even gold, were drawn out and wrapped in a thin layer of quartz. The fabrics woven with that were warm and did not lack flexibility, but their contact with the skin was unpleasant.
There was another metallurgical factory—or, more modestly, repair shop—which was of particular interest to Oscar.
There were two air plants, one in the city and one under the pylons, which also supplied water and gas. The water, extracted from underground, was partly directed into conduits to supply the city and, in the suburb, to irrigate the crops, the other part being decomposed by hydrolysis into oxygen and hydrogen. The oxygen was expelled through a ventilator to regenerate the atmosphere and compensate for losses; the hydrogen was distributed, as on Earth, as gas.
Aurore’s commentaries—in the case of the electrolytic manufacture of the air, for instance—permitted us to obtain a better understanding of what we had seen, but our observations necessarily remained superficial and fragmentary as those of the factories of Khalifur. It was impossible to penetrate the principles by virtue of which their machines functioned.
Imagine a physicist almost completely ignorant of electricity, who was shown, without the slightest explanation, a turbo-alternator rotating at 2,000 cycles. Do you think that he could arrive at a clear understanding of the forces in play and the construction of the machine? We were in a similar situation with regard to the secrets of Erotian science, aggravated by the fact that Aurore could only obtain second-hand descriptions of the machines rendered by laymen.
We had seen motors functioning in the factories thanks to cables that obviously supplied them with power. During an excursion under the pylons south of the Palace we had even been able to examine the generators of that power at close range: in the void, a gigantic battery of four hundred mirrors, each two meters in diameter, aimed skywards as if to capture mysterious radiations, which were doubtless converted into usable currents, electric or otherwise, inside enormous cylinders installed beneath the pylons, hermetically sealed like gear-boxes, inside which a continuous hum was audible. But what could Aurore be expected to make of descriptions of that sort, even scrupulously detailed?
Might we have been better informed had we been able to visit the machines, and the laboratories where the scientists presumably worked, in the Palace itself? Like Aurore, however, we were not permitted to circulate freely there, and were reduced to hypotheses.
On the other hand, our excursions into the city’s inhabited buildings, open to all comers, had already showed us the vestiges on a very advanced industrial civilization, parallel to our own and even reaching at a superior level: domestic machinery and appliances whose forms and functions were often discernible, but more often unknown. Some of these objects were still in working order, but did not tempt anyone, since the present-day Erotians, in their simplified existence, had only kept a few scraps of the technology of the past.
At the most, the lacertians drew from these reserves the cables, electric bulbs, radiators and other accessories they still used, or they detached a steel tube from a item of furniture in order to make a walking-stick; the bowwows appropriated pieces of tin-plate from old containers; the repair-shop used fragments of nickel-steel as an iron mine.
Where the ancient abandoned civilization really offered an inexhaustible quarry was in the districts devastated by fire, which we had perceived through the window of the “Berlitz lesson” room, which extended westwards behind the Palace outside the atmospheric zone. An excursion undertaken in that direction, with respirators, proved to us that the present Khalifur was only a small part of the original city. That district had escaped disaster thanks to the particular construction of its armored buildings.
Several million inhabitants must once have swarmed in that now-obliterated metropolis, which formed a kind of Pompeii, conserved in the void for how many centuries? The buildings there had been unprotected and the torpedoes, like the fire, had had free rein. The cannons, tanks and machine-guns lying in the edges of the rubble, with entire regiments of charred lacertian skeletons, attested to the military nature of the catastrophe. A flying machine, broken up but recognizable—a kind of helicopter—might have contributed to it with its bombs. Spared edifices were rare, but they still contained enough to resupply present-day Khalifur, whose needs were so limited, indefinitely. And it seemed, from the footprints imprinted in the ashes, that people from the Palace occasionally went out—so the Lacertians did have respirators at their disposal.
Among the enigmas of that strange world, put into sharp relief by our explorations, one of the most irritating was the disappearance of the atmosphere that had doubtless once existed on Eros. No hypotheses offered a satisfactory explanation of it. Another accessory problem was posed, however, perhaps less insoluble, whose solution might be of some importance to us. Might there not exist, in some region of the asteroid—in an enclosed valley—a residuum of natural atmosphere, where animal or vegetable life might survive? Where an inhabited agglomeration other than Khalifur might exist? Apart from documentary interest, new resources might be revealed there. In our situation, no opportunity ought to be neglected.
We decided to undertake a long exploration of the surface of Eros. The Russian having refused to accompany us, Oscar and I discussed the practical possibilities.
Assuming that the planet was four hundred kilometers in diameter, that meant 1,200 for a complete circuit. That was a long way to travel on foot, even with the seven-league boots that the reduction in weight seemed to provide. We could not reason that since, on Earth, with a gravitation of 1, one can cover 5 kilometers an hour, here on Eros, where one weighs twenty times less, one could cover 5 x 20 = 100 per hour. Experimentation demonstrated to us that, although the diminution of weight permitted us to progress in bounds of twenty meters, that advantage was restricted from the viewpoint of rapidity because one remained in the air for several seconds before landing. A speed of thirty kilometers an hour was our maximum. A complete circuit of Eros would take at least forty hours. The oxygen cylinder of the respiratory masks only contained a reserve of eight hours; we would therefore need to carry five or six each. A dangerous expenditure!
Oh, if only we could repair one of the almost-intact automobiles discovered in the ruins—but then, even if they had gasoline, they wouldn’t work in a vacuum.
Aurore reminded us, however, that by virtue of the shape of the asteroid—like a pomegranate seed—we were on the spherical cap, relatively close to the edge in an easterly direction. That short voyage, a hundred kilometers there and back, would take three hours, and provide sufficient information.
The desert of red sand, which had seemed limitless at first, only extended, in reality, a few kilometers to the east of the landing-point of the rocket. By veering southwards we reached a kind of highway, bordered by a monorail. The highway was as clear as when the traffic of Erotian civilization had come to a standstill, but fissures forming deep cracks in the ground soon began to cut it at increasingly regular interva
ls. Some of them, veritably unfathomable gulfs ten meters wide, which we could jump from a standing start, attested that a powerful earthquake must have shaken the entire region. Its intensity seemed to have been greater the further we advanced. The few buildings that we encountered, and those of a small city, were reduced to rubble.
After an hour of progress in ten-meter strides, the landscape, ripped and ravaged, was encumbered by lava-flows and giant boulders. From the top of one of them, finally, a lacuna opened up before us, much as the naïve geographers of the Middle Ages represented “the edge” of the supposedly-flat world: an oblique abyss with a sixty-degree slope, indefinitely prolonged toward a base covering the entire width of the horizon. We had arrived at the margin of the plateau, of the spherical cap supporting Khalifur. That vertiginous cliff reddening in the sunlight like an infernal vision, reminded me a little of the creeks of Piana, magnified a hundred times, but it offered no trace of vegetation and ended with the black and starry sky of the void. One might have thought that it was the monstrous slope of a gaping crater hollowed out by an explosion of plutonian force, or a planetary cataclysm.
I contemplated the gulf, reduced to silence by the respiratory mask. Oscar started throwing stones—blocks as big as his head. They fell and rebounded, rolling down the fragmented slope for a long time, shrinking indefinitely, reduced to nothing in eternal silence of space.
XX. Among the “Bowwows”
Our visits to the savages of the suburb, accidental to begin with and devoid of definite purpose, became more frequent as Ida became more interested in them. She ended up dragging out to the pylon forest almost every day.
Although the proletarians of the factories, overworked and undernourished, were already one degree inferior in sturdiness and their enjoyment of life to their fellows, the wrestlers in green leotards and yellow shorts, the bowwows in tinplate loincloths formed a third category, and represented the pariahs of the species.
The young ones, and even the adults, moved indifferently upright or on all fours. Their sole vestiges of superiority over animals were their articulate language and a penchant for adornment among the females, who decorated themselves with scraps of fabric and fitted caps made from fragments of metal connected by bits of electric wire over their long bushy hair. These wretches—there might have been three thousand in total—lived in frightful hovels, improvised from rusty cans and pieces of armor plate, into which several hundred of them piled, men, women and children pell-mell.
Distributed throughout the dome they had a dozen rudimentary installations at their disposal, through which thin streams of water ran perpetually, and where hydrogen flames burned that permitted them to cook any animal nourishment they were able to procure. A fauna reduced to a handful of species did, in fact, live in the region of the pylons—guinea-pigs, rats and giant woodlice as big as armadillos—which constituted the bowwows’ principal food source.
The only means they had of obtaining a synthetic meat ration, without losing their liberty, seemed to be to sign up for the harvesting of lianas and crystalline fruits or the mosses garnishing the quadrilaterals edged by cement. That was also an opportunity for them to drink water from the irrigation channels, which only flowed during the harvest, under the surveillance of police. As soon as the latter turned their backs, they could be seen throwing themselves down on their bellies and lapping up the precious liquid, even from gutters, without worrying about the blows that rained down on their backs when they were caught.
As for the operations of the official recruiters who extracted from the reserve of “hominine material” represented by the savages whatever was required to fill gaps in the proletariat of the factories, we only found out about them later.
Cannibalism completed the nutritional resources. The sick and the old, incapable of climbing to the tops of the pylons, served as nourishment for the living. They allowed themselves to be beaten to death with iron bars with a perfect indifference. In addition, brawls between bowwows were commonplace, and frequently resulted in cadavers, for wounded individuals incapable of self-defense were fished off.
Given the psychology of the lacertian masters on the one hand, and the prolific abundance of the savages on the other, I strongly suspect that the exhibition fights periodically organized in a kind of stadium situated on the edge of the city were deliberately intended to bring down the numbers of the latter to a normal level when the increase became excessive. It was the only circumstance in which the hominines of the city associated with their fellows from outside, and they regarded these contests between bowwow champions as rare treats. All their ancient depths of atavistic bestiality, unemployed in their current way of life, rejoiced in these fights to the death, which set two adversaries against one another whose ten fingers were fitted with artificial steels claws and sharp as razors. Naturally, they were followed by abominable feasts.
These brief explosions of violent instinct did not prevent the savages in loincloths from submitting in complete passivity to the scorn and blows of their overseers. They seemed to consider themselves as vile animals, by virtue of seeing themselves treated as such by other hominines. When Ida dragged us into the company of the bowwows, our police acolytes affected to keep themselves apart, to avoid being polluted by such proximity.
The camps are especially numerous in the south of the suburb, where the atmospheric zone, free of cultivation, reaches four kilometers in breadth and forms a sort of “reservation” for the savages. At each of our visits there we receive a triumphal welcome, but the turbulent curiosity of the outset has become more discreet and the savages occupied in harvesting vegetables, in order to avoid punishment, content themselves with addressing friendly gestures to us.
We are welcomed from further away by the joyful cries of children, whom we catch lying in ambush around some burrow for a rat or a giant woodlouse. The brats quit the pleasure of the hunt for an escort for us, prudently keeping out of range of our wrestlers’ wands and waiting until they have stopped following us any closer to the habitations to come and kiss our hands.
Ida exercises a veritable magnetism upon them. The adults, especially the mothers, prostrate themselves before her with adoring yapping when she goes into the shades sheet metal and old cans. But what courage I require to follow her into the bosom of the stink exhaled by all those unwashed bodies! I don’t mention that to Oscar, who is delighted by this divination of his fiancée.
The polyglot talent characteristic of the Slav race, which our Russian possesses to a high degree, has soon permitted her to distinguish and retain a few words of the bowwow language, quite different from the jargon, mingled with lacertian, that the city slaves speech. Outside of the daily ritual exchange of “Comrade…tovarich,” she has renounced any attempt to domesticate our jailers, definitively and irredeemable brutalized by their role as guard-dogs and crystallized in the pride of their caste.
“They’ve sold their soul to the tyrants,” she affirms, with a grandiloquent warmth. But she avows an increasing interest, a veritable love for the bowwows, whom she finds infinitely more sympathetic and near to humanity—and it’s necessary to admit that, when she strives patiently to capture the attention of the chattering crowd pressing around us, and obtains a little silence in order to allow them to speak one at a time, their pink albino eyes have a naivety and a candor that almost makes them lovable.
One feels that they participate in the natural innocence of forest animals. One is tempted to forgive them their fits of ferocity toward one another, and even their cannibalism. And there is a secret reproach in their eyes for the fatality that crushes them beneath their sinister destiny.
The abject promiscuity in which they live, the repulsive dirtiness of their hovels, the mothers’ ignorance of all infantile hygiene, and the kind of spiritual death into which these wretches are plunged, excite a dolorous emotion in Ida. Oscar is not far from sharing it, in spite of his professional viewpoint of an “impartial witness.” And my heart too is wrung; I can’t help fe
eling a sentiment of fraternal pity, and sometimes I wonder whether Ida’s hypothesis might not be accurate…whether these hominines might be the descendants of terrestrial humans abducted by an interplanetary expedition long ago, when the civilization of Eros reached its culmination.
Ida vituperated against the lacertian tyranny that has reduced our brethren to slavery and reduced them to this lamentable decadence. She was exalted by the idea of “saving” them—if not in those in the city, ignobly proud of their servitude, at least these poor and naïve bowwows. She repeated, after visits to the encampments:
“They’ve even lost the faculty of thinking by virtue of misery, and no initiative will ever rose among them capable of enabling them to recover it—but I’m convinced that they only lack a voice to render them conscious of their human dignity, a spark to reignite the dead flame within them.”
She thought that the first priority was teaching them the principles of hygiene; then she would turn them away from cannibalism; then...
In brief, she hoped to devote herself to a veritable apostolate with regard to the savages, as soon as her knowledge of their language was sufficiently advanced. Using her ascendancy over Oscar, she had enrolled him in her enterprise. He noted down the new words of the bowwow idiom acquired at each visit, and in the evening, in our prison, in my corner with Aurore, I heard them both repeating their vocabulary and performing exercises in pronunciation.
When she asked me to participate in her work by teaching me bowwow too, I thought at first that it was a ruse; ten days still remained before the fateful date on the thirtieth of June, when it would be necessary to renounce all hope of departing before the asteroid came into conjunction with the Earth again in nineteen months’ time, and although she and Oscar had stopped taking their respirators with them, I had not immediately renounced accompanying them in their excursions.
